The only impressive part of the iPad3 is the high DPI screen, which is a procurement problem at best. Everything else is used by virtually all major vendors in the space, and existed on prior hardware.

That's true of any device, even the Google Glasses.

The iPad 3 is an evolution of the original iPad, which was an evolution of the original iPhone, which was an evolution of Apple's earlier dalliances with the Newton and then the iPod.

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Are you waiting for holographic AI?

No, but seeing someone take steps towards making life imitate art:

That gets me interested. But I'm just a geek, which negates the value of my opinion (according to the Battlefront Standard Argument.)

Quickly! Something, anything to bash a new take on something that isn't from Apple!

Let's just overlook the attempt to drive a newer form-factor and mode of interaction, cause that's the same as a high dpi screen. Can't let Google be more "innovative" than Apple, not for a moment.

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The iPad 3 is an evolution of the original iPad, which was an evolution of the original iPhone, which was an evolution of Apple's earlier dalliances with the Newton and then the iPod.

Which is why it's completely uninteresting. Google's actually doing something different, rather than consistently being one predictable step beyond the previous and making it possible for people to get in early rather than waiting for a company to assume they have it 100% perfect without actually testing it.

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No, it doesn't negate it at all. I want Jarvis from Iron Man.

You apparently don't pay attention to the arguments made here. dwell just bashed them for "making the typical geek mistake" of not being Apple, and the hundreds of other times things are dismissed because they're "of interest only to geeks." If it isn't immediately accessible to the lowest common denominator, it's shouldn't be delivered.

Self-driving cars is interesting but besides the technical and cost obstacles to overcome, the biggest is probably going to be social.

People won't give up control over their cars easily. Luxury cars have self-parking and crash-avoidance systems, which engage different levels of control over the car. These systems haven't seem to set the world on fire.

May take a couple of generations for autonomous cars to gain some level of acceptance. But for the advantages -- energy efficiency, better traffic management -- to come to the fore, doesn't it require pretty much every car on the road to be self-driven (and perhaps coordinated with other self-driven cars to maximize traffic efficiency)?

You apparently don't pay attention to the arguments made here. dwell just bashed them for "making the typical geek mistake" of not being Apple, and the hundreds of other times things are dismissed because they're "of interest only to geeks." If it isn't immediately accessible to the lowest common denominator, it's shouldn't be delivered.

They're making a HUGE deal over an underpowered smartphone duct taped to a glasses frame. It's not ready for prime time and won't be until AT LEAST 2014. Even then, nothing they have shown is any more impressive than taping a flip cam to your head and pressing record.

Looks like Facebook is rewriting their HTML5 Frankenstein app to use native Objective C code. That's great since currently the app is slow and unreliable. It seems like native apps still are the best (or maybe only?) way to get good performance. I wonder what this means for the current app climate.

Dunno... but pretty damning of the "everything will be better with HTML5" mantra. But then, that was only a stopgap to get people to pause early on (and a safeguard from behind cut out of the market). Now that it doesn't matter as much, it's much better for Apple for people to write native apps. Too bad Apple even chooses the small sample set of languages you have to use... "thinking different" at its finest.

Some may have been happy, but I don't think most iPhone users were happy with Apple initially only allowing HTML5. I remember even reading the Engadget live blog and Joshua et. al. calling it really lame as well. I would like to know who thought that was better. I think the argument was that HTML5 is capable and not everything requires a native app, but I'm thinking even that isn't quite so capable for anything other than the bare minimum. Facebook's horrid app along with the Gmail apps for iOS seem to prove that. Heck, I think Apple's iTunes and App Store apps on the iPhone use webkit views behind the scenes or something and they also suck IMO.

Finally, I don't think calling it a stopgap is accurate. I believe it's mentioned in the Jobs' biography or somewhere else I heard that Jobs didn't want third party apps on it and he had to be convinced/overruled...similar to the iTunes on Windows thing.

ZnU, you gotta stop speaking for me, because you don't represent my arguments correctly in the least.

It's tiresome to watch you mangle my argument into something you can handle.

The problem here isn't that I'm misrepresenting you, it's that your arguments are incoherent. You jump from handwaving about low unit pricing (in order to imply that app stores and mobile platforms are bad for developers) to making trivial points about how app purchases don't account for a majority of the economic activity taking place on digital devices (as if this somehow means isn't not important if app sales can turn a profit). You argue on the basis of misleading definitions (e.g. you keep implying your interlocutors aren't including freemium apps when they use this term). You make screwy comparisons, like between forming a startup to write mobile apps, and working as a contract programmer on desktop apps. You constantly misrepresent my position, for instance pretending that I believe anyone who writes an iOS app will make lots of money, when I have explicitly said otherwise well over a dozen times. In general, you have constructed an extremely elaborate theory of the market on the premise that development of paid mobile apps is a bad deal for developers compared with other sorts of software development, a premise that you have not even remotely demonstrated to be true.

As nearly as I can tell, this is all just an attempt on your part to devalue what Apple has done — to avoid admitting the simple reality that the iOS App Store has been massively successful, has created one of the world's richest and fastest-growing app ecosystems, and has provided a huge amount of opportunity for developers, particularly small independent developers — and Google has not been able to do this on Android, despite shipping more units. This conflicts with your basic belief that market share trumps everything, so it just has to be wrong somehow, I guess.

fitten wrote:

Some searching didn't turn up anything about that... you got any links? Why was it so rumored and secret, then? Why all the buzz on launch day?

It was sarcasm.

ev9_tarantula wrote:

Somebody has to be first, and Google has the deep pockets to fund such things.

It's just not really clear to me that we're close enough to do anything that looks much like the eventual evolution of AR. I think useful AR requires the ability to convincingly overlay generated images in 3D space in relation to physical objects, for instance. This requires fairly sophisticated machine vision software, and enough computational power to process a camera feed into a 3D model of the user's surroundings. Oh, yeah, and you have to do this without noticeable latency. None of this is presently possible to any useful degree with a portable system. Most of the AR demos one sees of virtual objects interacting with real ones involve stationary cameras, stationary physical objects (often with tracking marks helpfully printed on them), interaction where latency isn't that important, and access to desktop-level processing power (or beyond).

Without the ability to do this, an AR system built today is going to have very limited use cases, like maybe it's just a better way to view travel directions. Plus of course there's some level of usefulness as a head-mounted display, but that's not AR, strictly speaking.

We could easily be an entire decade from someone being able to do for AR what the iPad did for tablets. And the fact that Google is out there working on this in public this early doesn't really increase the odds that they'll be the ones to eventually do it.

That's my fucking problem with Glass. If were Apple it would be shipping in 0 - 2 weeks or they wouldn't talk about it.

Yup... if Apple can't find a way to make 40% margins on it and sell millions of units, it dies in committee rather than introducing to the world and letting people figure out if it's useful and maybe find niche homes. I'm guessing you hate research/science in general as well.

Self-driving cars is interesting but besides the technical and cost obstacles to overcome, the biggest is probably going to be social.

People won't give up control over their cars easily. Luxury cars have self-parking and crash-avoidance systems, which engage different levels of control over the car. These systems haven't seem to set the world on fire.

May take a couple of generations for autonomous cars to gain some level of acceptance. But for the advantages -- energy efficiency, better traffic management -- to come to the fore, doesn't it require pretty much every car on the road to be self-driven (and perhaps coordinated with other self-driven cars to maximize traffic efficiency)?

There's no doubt that it is a very long term project. But it is also a project where what is learnt along the way may in itself be highly valuable to a company like Google. A lot of technology is derived from trying to solve one problem, perhaps even failing, but finding other applications for it.

May take a couple of generations for autonomous cars to gain some level of acceptance. But for the advantages -- energy efficiency, better traffic management -- to come to the fore, doesn't it require pretty much every car on the road to be self-driven (and perhaps coordinated with other self-driven cars to maximize traffic efficiency)?

For the full benefits, sure, but one could achieve many of the benefits by, say, converting HOV lanes to automated lanes. Or, in cities, you could convert bus lanes — if the automated vehicles coordinated properly with the busses this would probably have no negative impact on the latter.

Drivers watching automated vehicles zip by in the next lane over while they were stuck in stop and go traffic (the existence of which is almost entirely a consequence of some quirks of how humans drive) would be a powerful sales tool for automated car vendors.

That's my fucking problem with Glass. If were Apple it would be shipping in 0 - 2 weeks or they wouldn't talk about it.

Yup... if Apple can't find a way to make 40% margins on it and sell millions of units, it dies in committee rather than introducing to the world and letting people figure out if it's useful and maybe find niche homes. I'm guessing you hate research/science in general as well.

I love science and research. My problem is hyping a non-existant tech demo. It's like promising Minority Report then delivering Kinect. Sure, Kinect is cool, but it's not Minority Report. Take any little kid out there and ask them to come up with a cool concept and they can do it. Delivering on the concept is what counts.

Glass is the kernel of something that will be cool in 10 - 20 years, not today. All that's been shown so far is already is a NFL helmet cam in a geekier package.

That's my fucking problem with Glass. If were Apple it would be shipping in 0 - 2 weeks or they wouldn't talk about it.

Yup... if Apple can't find a way to make 40% margins on it and sell millions of units, it dies in committee rather than introducing to the world and letting people figure out if it's useful and maybe find niche homes. I'm guessing you hate research/science in general as well.

I love science and research. My problem is hyping a non-existant tech demo. It's like promising Minority Report then delivering Kinect. Sure, Kinect is cool, but it's not Minority Report. Take any little kid out there and ask them to come up with a cool concept and they can do it. Delivering on the concept is what counts.

Glass is the kernel of something that will be cool in 10 - 20 years, not today. All that's been shown so far is already is a NFL helmet cam in a geekier package.

They didn't promise anything. They showed what they can do *today*... basically stream video from a camera mounted on the glasses into a G+ meetup. There are lots of other ideas being bounced around... like speech to text (assisting the deaf, subtitles on movies, maybe even translation to another language, vector overlays for helping play pool, etc). So, they make something so people can play with it. Speaking of Kinect, lots of people took that and run, too... using multiple to construct 3D images from real objects, helping medical rehabilitation, etc.

Drivers watching automated vehicles zip by in the next lane over while they were stuck in stop and go traffic (the existence of which is almost entirely a consequence of some quirks of how humans drive) would be a powerful sales tool for automated car vendors.

People won't give up control over their cars easily. Luxury cars have self-parking and crash-avoidance systems, which engage different levels of control over the car. These systems haven't seem to set the world on fire.

That's a real problem, but if you take the long view, it might not matter.

For instance, blind people would probably buy these cars; even deaf people might be interested. So would a lot of the wheelchair bound, the frail elderly; the elderly with failing vision; a lot of people, actually.

Some people, too, would rent them for long car rides when they didn't want to drive. I could see a lot of trips where that would balance out -- LA to SF, Minneapolis to Chicago, LA to Phoenix, Boston to DC. It's a long list. Your TV News Reporter would be sure to try that one out.

After a couple of years of that, and even with some bad pub for some accidents, I suspect people's fears would be alleviated.

The truth is, the way we drive cars right now is like a more or less continuous war in terms of casualties.

Heck, the US just fought two wars at once and yet more people died in auto accidents than the wars. Think of that. If the self-driving car was even break-even with that, never mind actually better, we'd get people to sign up.

In short, if it really works, the social problems, while real, would fade over time.

Yup, and there can be more 'inventive' car designs, too... if you don't need a driver, allow that seat to rotate (just in case the driver does need to drive) and everyone else sit facing each other. You can also have vehicles that are much more accessible to wheelchairs (drive the chair into it and just let the car drive), etc. You can have cars with beds, etc.

For instance, blind people would probably buy these cars; even deaf people might be interested. So would a lot of the wheelchair bound, the frail elderly; the elderly with failing vision; a lot of people, actually.

Once these things are allowed to drive without a competent operator and people start trusting them a bit, you can also imagine they'd be extremely useful to pre-driving-age teens — and the parents who wouldn't need to shuttle them around anymore. And once those kids had gotten used to being driven around like this, many probably wouldn't bother with ever getting licenses.

ZeroZanzibar wrote:

Heck, the US just fought two wars at once and yet more people died in auto accidents than the wars. Think of that. If the self-driving car was even break-even with that, never mind actually better, we'd get people to sign up.

Yup, and there can be more 'inventive' car designs, too... if you don't need a driver, allow that seat to rotate (just in case the driver does need to drive) and everyone else sit facing each other. You can also have vehicles that are much more accessible to wheelchairs (drive the chair into it and just let the car drive), etc. You can have cars with beds, etc.

It would be safer to sit closer to the center of the car, which would also be more practical. And eventually (though not until you ban human drivers) these things are going to safe enough that you can probably get rid of seat belt requirements, which a lot of people would probably like, and eliminate safety features that contribute to vehicle weight, enhancing efficiency.

Think of electric cars as well — right now, charging takes long enough that people don't want to sit in the car while it's happening. So you want to be able to do it at home. But that's a hassle because of the power requirements (if you don't want it to literally take 16 hours). What if the car just drove itself to a charging station while you weren't using it? Actually, there are all sorts of use cases for vehicles that can drive themselves without passengers — deliveries, autonomous taxis, car rental services that don't require pickup or return at a specific location, sharing cars more efficiently within households (one family member uses the car to drive to work, then sends the car back on its own so other family members can use it), having the thing drive you to the airport and then find its way home, etc.

To put even the car accident rate in perspective, over 4x as many die of heart attacks than all accidents combined.

Thanks for that. The fact that car accident fatalities in the US dwarf US deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan is not at all suprising the number of human-hours Americans have spent driving in cars over the last several years massively dwarfs the amount of human hours we've spent in either war.

I always thought the real use of a self-driving car would be parking. Have it drop you off at the mall and then go park 5 miles away outside downtown. Then come and have it pick you up. Skip circling and then walking in for 15 minutes from lot 3E.

Once you get rid of the need to have car parking near places you want to drive to, you can redesign how cities and commerce work. Since cities drive economic growth and innovation, making them work more efficiently would have enormous economic and social consequences.

Edit: Obviously reducing deaths is of great benefit too. But adding sealbelts to cars wasn't quite a revolution. Changing how we commute and build cities would certainly be, probably on par with freeing cities of the need to keep horses.

I always thought the real use of a self-driving car would be parking. Have it drop you off at the mall and then go park 5 miles away outside downtown. Then come and have it pick you up. Skip circling and then walking in for 15 minutes from lot 3E.

Oh, so save 15m and double the heart attack rate! You should park instead of circle and then walk the last 100y

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Once you get rid of the need to have car parking near places you want to drive to, you can redesign how cities and commerce work. Since cities drive economic growth and innovation, making them work more efficiently would have enormous economic and social consequences.

Edit: Obviously reducing deaths is of great benefit too. But adding sealbelts to cars wasn't quite a revolution. Changing how we commute and build cities would certainly be, probably on par with freeing cities of the need to keep horses.

Redesigning cities to be more pedestrian would be great. Have self driving cars park in subterranean multistory garages, but design the public spaces such that you have to walk five minutes in and out of the area (with emergency roads for fire/ambulance/police) would be good for public health, especially if that 5 minutes was walking through an urban garden/forest of some sort (clean the air AND get exercise).

Some may have been happy, but I don't think most iPhone users were happy with Apple initially only allowing HTML5. I remember even reading the Engadget live blog and Joshua et. al. calling it really lame as well. I would like to know who thought that was better. I think the argument was that HTML5 is capable and not everything requires a native app, but I'm thinking even that isn't quite so capable for anything other than the bare minimum. Facebook's horrid app along with the Gmail apps for iOS seem to prove that. Heck, I think Apple's iTunes and App Store apps on the iPhone use webkit views behind the scenes or something and they also suck IMO.

Finally, I don't think calling it a stopgap is accurate. I believe it's mentioned in the Jobs' biography or somewhere else I heard that Jobs didn't want third party apps on it and he had to be convinced/overruled...similar to the iTunes on Windows thing.

That was then. But now nearly everyone has shown they're willing to write native apps, Apple does not seem very interested in developing HTML5 up to the point where it could be 'near-native'. This is understandable, as HTML5 only helps developers port their stuff to Android et al. Something like Facebook really ought to be simple enough to build with web technology (much less the more complex interactive stuff), but alas it isn't.

Also, "WWDC attendees don't like HTML5" has to be taken with a huge grain of salt. 1) They're mostly Objective-C programmers, so what would you expect, and 2) They are making huge bank in the current model and wouldn't want to face competition from cheaper 'web developers'.

AR isn't all that special. Making, and selling, a prototype device for it is good, but again, not that special. Making it available and useful for the masses? Special. Google hasn't done that yet.

You are a tough audience. If someone had told you a year ago that a self-driving car could operate in actual traffic and not just on a test track, I think you've thought the person was out of their mind. I would have.

Adobe was very public about dropping mobile Flash last fall. In case that wasn’t clear enough, the developer just drew a line in the sand: Android 4.1 doesn’t, and won’t ever, get certification for Flash. The company is stopping short of saying that Flash won’t run, but it’s evident that Adobe won’t help you if the web browser plugin doesn’t install (or breaks in spectacular fashion) on that Nexus 7. Just to underscore the point, the firm is also halting new installations of Flash from Google Play as of August 15th. Security updates and other vital patches will continue on for existing users.

The more salient point is the market power. Jobs was not some disinterested observer. He had, by definition, his thumb on the scale when he pronounced.

And yet Android has a larger market share, meaning that regardless of Jobs statements Flash could find an audience. Overall nobody has been very satisfied with flash on mobile; good Flash apps on mobile have to be written for mobile, only the simplest of flash interfaces work ok without adaptation.

In retrospect, can anyone claim that the hyper-adoption of an open, non-proprietary standard that does everything the Flash did is a negative?

Let's stipulate that this change was inevitable, just for argument's sake if nothing else.

If I was some random company who had to implement the change a year or two early, instead of what my customers really wanted in that time frame, I might not be so sanguine. Jobs' pronouncement didn't increase anyone's budget to accelerate this change and that meant many businesses had to do something on a time frame not natural to them even if we presume that Jobs was correct. He still put his thumb on the scale and that cost somebody something. But, since its spread out widely, then it is possible to ignore this, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Moreover, I'm not so sure we can expect to have benign dictatorships and philosopher kings in business.

I didn't particularly like how MS made IE6 into a de facto standard for so many years, either, and I don't think I was alone.

I always thought the real use of a self-driving car would be parking. Have it drop you off at the mall and then go park 5 miles away outside downtown. Then come and have it pick you up. Skip circling and then walking in for 15 minutes from lot 3E.

Oh, so save 15m and double the heart attack rate! You should park instead of circle and then walk the last 100y

Quote:

Once you get rid of the need to have car parking near places you want to drive to, you can redesign how cities and commerce work. Since cities drive economic growth and innovation, making them work more efficiently would have enormous economic and social consequences.

Edit: Obviously reducing deaths is of great benefit too. But adding sealbelts to cars wasn't quite a revolution. Changing how we commute and build cities would certainly be, probably on par with freeing cities of the need to keep horses.

Redesigning cities to be more pedestrian would be great. Have self driving cars park in subterranean multistory garages, but design the public spaces such that you have to walk five minutes in and out of the area (with emergency roads for fire/ambulance/police) would be good for public health, especially if that 5 minutes was walking through an urban garden/forest of some sort (clean the air AND get exercise).

There are some other demographic and technological trends that help this, and I think autonomous cars will come on quickly, like an avalanche, in the next few years:1. 'Generation Neutral' - the young adults have been spending money on phones and earning less and less over the last 10 years, they just aren't into cars.2. Smartphones make cities more appealing than rural areas.3. Gas prices make cities more appealing than rural areas.4. Many suburbs are contracting as a result of housing nonsense, no jobs growth for the last 10 years, and finally, the municipal credit crunch. The largest cities will be better funded and have better services, not only because of gas prices and technology favoring urban centers now, but also because that's where people are going. So the cities have youth population growth and those are the drivers of future economic activity.5. People work from home all the time.6. People are used to surrendering their decision making to the GPS.7. Many luxury cars already drive themselves on the highways reliably (keep lanes, brake and accelerate based on traffic).

Autonomous cars are a well-positioned technology, as they say, for a quick adoption. We'll still have a tremendous car culture, but even on my favorite car blog, enthusiasts are sick of commuting, parking, gas prices and just want track days and events to engage with their passion.

Autonomous cars are a well-positioned technology, as they say, for a quick adoption. We'll still have a tremendous car culture, but even on my favorite car blog, enthusiasts are sick of commuting, parking, gas prices and just want track days and events to engage with their passion.

I'd love to have 150 acres a few miles out of town... land is just too expensive unless you get more than 60 miles out of town around here (and that's too far to commute, IMO). I've actually only been in my daily driver about two trips per week for the last two months, though... started walking to work It's a 10 minute drive (about six miles) but about 30 minutes (1.5 miles) by walking (through woods and a big drainage ditch).

Drivers watching automated vehicles zip by in the next lane over while they were stuck in stop and go traffic (the existence of which is almost entirely a consequence of some quirks of how humans drive) would be a powerful sales tool for automated car vendors.

And just what are those quirks? (Hint--it isn't quirks--it is simple physics).